The big sleep: how the world’s most chaotic country is beating a deadly disease

The big sleep: how the world’s most chaotic country is beating a deadly disease

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a nation both beset and associated with multiple issues of violence, political instability and health inequalities. It is natural to assume therefore that a deadly disease such as sleeping sickness, which was spread rapidly throughout the region following the ‘opening up of Africa’ after the European colonial invasion along the Congo River and had 30,000 recorded cases at the turn of the millennium, would be too much for the countries fragile health infrastructure to deal with. However, Sarah Boseley provides an account of how Congolese doctors have taken on the disease and have mostly defeated it, amounting to ‘a quiet triumph for a country that has such a bad image’.